Air pollution was responsible for 2.6 million deaths across South Asia in 2021 alone, with brick manufacturing contributing significantly to this burden. In particular, the Indo-Gangetic Plain; a densely populated and highly polluted region spanning northern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and parts of Afghanistan sees brick kilns contributing 8-14% of ambient air pollution. Traditional monitoring approaches, such as field surveys and manual annotation using tools like Google Earth Pro, are time and labor-intensive. Prior ML-based efforts for automated detection have relied on costly high-resolution commercial imagery and non-public datasets, limiting reproducibility and scalability. In this work, we introduce SENTINELKILNDB, a publicly available, hand-validated benchmark of 62,671 brick kilns spanning three kiln types Fixed Chimney Bull's Trench Kiln (FCBK), Circular FCBK (CFCBK), and Zigzag kilns - annotated with oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) across 2.8 million km2 using free and globally accessible Sentinel-2 imagery. We benchmark state-of-the-art oriented object detection models and evaluate generalization across in-region, out-of-region, and super-resolution settings. SENTINELKILNDB enables rigorous evaluation of geospatial generalization and robustness for low-resolution object detection, and provides a new testbed for ML models addressing real-world environmental and remote sensing challenges at a continental scale. Datasets and code are available in SentinelKilnDB Dataset and SentinelKilnDB Benchmark, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Traditional recommender systems have relied heavily on positive feedback for learning user preferences, while the abundance of negative feedback in real-world scenarios remains underutilized. To address this limitation, recent years have witnessed increasing attention on leveraging negative feedback in recommender systems to enhance recommendation performance. However, existing methods face three major challenges: limited model compatibility, ineffective information exchange, and computational inefficiency. To overcome these challenges, we propose a modelagnostic Signed Dual-Channel Graph Contrastive Learning (SDCGCL) framework that can be seamlessly integrated with existing graph contrastive learning methods. The framework features three key components: (1) a Dual-Channel Graph Embedding that separately processes positive and negative graphs, (2) a Cross-Channel Distribution Calibration mechanism to maintain structural consistency, and (3) an Adaptive Prediction Strategy that effectively combines signals from both channels. Building upon this framework, we further propose a Dual-channel Feedback Fusion (DualFuse) model and develop a two-stage optimization strategy to ensure efficient training. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by substantial margins while exhibiting minimal computational complexity.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning tasks but remain computationally expensive, limiting their practical deployment. To address this, recent works have focused on distilling reasoning capabilities into smaller language models (sLMs) using chain-of-thought (CoT) traces from teacher LLMs. However, this approach struggles in scenarios requiring rare factual knowledge or precise computation, where sLMs often hallucinate due to limited capability. In this work, we propose Agent Distillation, a framework for transferring not only reasoning capability but full task-solving behavior from LLM-based agents into sLMs with retrieval and code tools. We improve agent distillation along two complementary axes: (1) we introduce a prompting method called first-thought prefix to enhance the quality of teacher-generated trajectories; and (2) we propose a self-consistent action generation for improving test-time robustness of small agents. We evaluate our method on eight reasoning tasks across factual and mathematical domains, covering both in-domain and out-of-domain generalization. Our results show that sLMs as small as 0.5B, 1.5B, 3B parameters can achieve performance competitive with nexttier larger 1.5B, 3B, 7B models fine-tuned using CoT distillation, demonstrating the potential of agent distillation for building practical, tool-using small agents.

The ultimate goal of code agents is to solve complex tasks autonomously. Although large language models (LLMs) have made substantial progress in code generation, real-world tasks typically demand full-fledged code repositories rather than simple scripts. Building such repositories from scratch remains a major challenge. Fortunately, GitHub hosts a vast, evolving collection of open-source repositories, which developers frequently reuse as modular components for complex tasks. Yet, existing frameworks like OpenHands and SWE-Agent still struggle to effectively leverage these valuable resources.

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Who Is the Real Kevin Warsh? Before the new Fed chairman got the job, he intimated that the central bank could cut interest rates, but last week he assumed the role of an inflation hawk. Kevin Warsh, the Republican financier who recently took over as the chairman of the Federal Reserve, holds economic views that could, kindly, be described as adaptable. Last summer, he said that the Fed had committed "the greatest mistake in macroeconomic policy in forty-five years" by allowing inflation to surge post- . This statement marked out Warsh as an inflation hawk, but late last year, after his name had surfaced as a possible candidate to succeed Jerome Powell as chair of the central bank, Warsh publicly argued that A.I. could generate big gains in productivity and be "structurally disinflationary."

Meta's Oversight Board has called on the social media company to strengthen its protection for ordinary people targeted by sexualized deepfakes. The Board recommends the addition of AI-generated impersonations in Meta's Adult Sexual Exploitation policy, arguing that those images and videos are non-consensual by default. It also wants Meta to allow users to designate connected accounts, such as trusted friends and family, who can report potential violations like non-consensual intimate imagery on their behalf. Finally, the Board recommends making AI-generated sexual impersonation a separate category from harassment and nudity in the company's content reporting and appeal forms. At the moment, only the residents of Texas and Florida have access to a specialized form that lists deepfake intimate imagery as a reason for the report.

Recently, semantically constrained adversarial examples (SemanticAE), which are directly generated from natural language instructions, have become a promising avenue for future research due to their flexible attacking forms, but have not been thoroughly explored yet. To generate SemanticAEs, current methods fall short of satisfactory attacking ability as the key underlying factors of semantic uncertainty in human instructions, such as referring diversity, descriptive incompleteness, and boundary ambiguity, have not been fully investigated. To tackle the issues, this paper develops a multi-dimensional instruction uncertainty reduction (InsUR) framework to generate more satisfactory SemanticAE, i.e., transferable, adaptive, and effective. Specifically, in the dimension of the sampling method, we propose the residual-driven attacking direction stabilization to alleviate the unstable adversarial optimization caused by the diversity of language references. By coarsely predicting the language-guided sampling process, the optimization process will be stabilized by the designed ResAdv-DDIM sampler, therefore releasing the transferable and robust adversarial capability of multi-step diffusion models.

We engage in the relatively underexplored task named thermal infrared image enhancement. Existing infrared image enhancement methods primarily focus on tackling individual degradations, such as noise, contrast, and blurring, making it difficult to handle coupled degradations. Meanwhile, all-in-one enhancement methods, commonly applied to RGB sensors, often demonstrate limited effectiveness due to the significant differences in imaging models. In sight of this, we first revisit the imaging mechanism and introduce a Progressive Prompt Fusion Network (PPFN). Specifically, the PPFN initially establishes prompt pairs based on the thermal imaging process. For each type of degradation, we fuse the corresponding prompt pairs to modulate the model's features, providing adaptive guidance that enables the model to better address specific degradations under single or multiple conditions. In addition, a Selective Progressive Training (SPT) mechanism is introduced to gradually refine the model's handling of composite cases to align the enhancement process, which not only allows the model to remove camera noise and retain key structural details, but also enhancing the overall contrast of the thermal image. Furthermore, we introduce the most high-quality, multi-scenarios infrared benchmark covering a wide range of scenarios. Extensive experiments substantiate that our approach not only delivers promising visual results under specific degradation but also significantly improves performance on complex degradation scenes, achieving a notable 8.76% improvement.

Crossmodal matching in single-cell omics is essential for explaining biological regulatory mechanisms and enhancing downstream analyses. However, current single-cell crossmodal models often suffer from three limitations: sparse modality signals, underutilization of biological attributes, and insufficient modeling of regulatory interactions. These challenges hinder generalization in data-scarce settings and restrict the ability to uncover fine-grained biologically meaningful crossmodal relationships. Here, we present a novel framework which reformulates crossmodal matching as a graph classification task on Attributed Bipartite Graphs (ABGs). It models single-cell ATAC-RNA data as an ABG, where each expressed ATAC and RNA is treated as a distinct node with unique IDs and biological features. To model crossmodal interaction patterns on the constructed ABG, we propose Bi2Former, a biologically-driven bipartite graph transformer that learns interpretable attention over ATAC-RNA pairs. This design enables the model to effectively learn and explain biological regulatory relationships between ATAC and RNA modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Bi2Former achieves state-of-the-art performance in crossmodal matching across diverse datasets, remains robust under sparse training data, generalizes to unseen cell types and datasets, and reveals biologically meaningful regulatory patterns.